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Yet on the other hand, Vigor/Celerity/Resilience being divided between Power/Finesse/Resistance stats has an element of elegance to it, which feels like the goal of Ferrinus's rules. The balance issue feels fairly light, like that should be a consequence of character creation to begin with, too. So then maybe to meet that, instead of having a set and arbitrary alignment of the single and double 'dip' level, why not allow vampires to get which type they get when be a consequence of their Clan? I think it'd be more elegant: Gangrels dip into Resolve/Presence/Wits powers first, Daevas dip into Composure/Presence/Manipulation first, Mehkets dip into Resolve/Int/Wits first, Ventrue dip into Resolve/Int/Manip first, Nosferatru dip into Resolve/Presence/Manipulation first... and then make three more Clans of vampires to be as elegant as possible to get a Social/Social/Mental, Social/Mental/Social and Social/Mental/Mental set in the game? Gerund fucked around with this message at 21:11 on Aug 7, 2013 |
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Aug 7, 2013 21:08
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Regardless of game or intention, stat swaps and stat adds are degenerate, min-maxy bullshit. "Weird, my intensely charismatic guy took a dot of Vigor and can now throw cars" is no better than "High Dex? Why yes, I WOULD like Fighting Finesse so that I get an additional benefit for already having king of derived stat contributors," and giving the same benefit to Celerity or Resilience at best gives you INH5's concerns about same-y builds, and at worst (and in actual play, before you have enough XP to just beeline down your talent trees to the "works for my build" tier) means that you're adding large dice pool benefits for a relatively much smaller xp investment. And even if it's coming from the spirit of fairness and making characters better at things they wouldn't nominally excel in, and keeping people from getting gated out of The Combat Stats because they wanted to be good at anything else in the game (the 1 STR 5 PRE vampire suddenly getting a huge boost to his combat efficacy, for one), making things additive means specializations will just encourage doubling up. Well, then you could just make it a flat PRE-for-STR or INT-for-STR swap, couldn't you? No, because then you're back to the problem where the best plan is to just max out the stat you wanted in the first place, and then buy supplementals to make it useful for everything else. And then you'd also run into the dead level problem where if Vigor 2 gives me the swap I want, Vigor 1 is just a surcharge for not building to designer intent. I mean, if you really wanted to go crazyshitnuts with it, you could just say Vigor gives you (Statmax+Vigor) Strength for one turn per Vitae spent, so that a normally strong vampire has a steady baseline with occasional crazy peaks, and the STR 1 Vigor 5 guy goes from zero to Incredible hero just the same. This has the potential to get wicked crazy at higher ranks, but if you're realistically going to be playing at the BP 6+ range, really, this isn't the system for you. Why doesn't Vigor offer more benefit for characters that already have a high Strength investment? I dunno, magic. Maybe give people a discount of 1 xp/dot when increasing Strength up to your Vigor rating and vice versa, do the same with Dexterity/Celerity and Stamina/Resilience.
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Aug 7, 2013 21:30
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Stat swaps are really different from stat adds, and you already hit on why in your post. "Replace Str with ____" (I include the idea at the end of your post here) lets a Vigor-using vampire dump Strength, whereas "Add ___ to Str" doesn't. That established, I'm not sure what's supposed to be shocking about a power that uses other stats on your character sheet making buying those stats up attractive - all the Disciplines do that, it's why you tend to get high Int Ventrue.
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Aug 7, 2013 21:36
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New draft of my Resilience idea: You still get +1 Stamina per dot. Resilience Armor works like before, except that it doesn't downgrade fire damage. 1 Dot: 1 always-on Res Armor, plus healing even one point of even one point of the damage dealt to you by any attack or hazard is enough to allow you to ignore any of that attack/hazard's other debilitating effects. 2 Dots: Spend 1 Vitae to downgrade the first 3 points of any fire damage to lethal and ignore wound penalties for a scene. 3 Dots: Spend 1 Vitae to increase your Res Armor to 3 for a scene. 4 Dots: If you have either the 2 or 3 dot abilities active, you can spend 1 Vitae to increase their effects by 2 for a turn. So you'd get 5 Res Armor or 5 points of fire downgrade. 5 Dots: You can spend 5 Vitae to heal a point of aggravated damage without waiting two days first. Also, if you are violently forced into Torpor, you can spend 2 Vitae + 1 Willpower to heal a lethal wound and wake up a scene later. I generally tried to make it involve less improvements of existing abilities and more new abilities with each dot. I'm not sure if 2 and 3 would work better if they swapped places, and I'm still not quite sure where to put ignoring wound penalties. And I'm wondering if 4 could use some additional punch, either by making it +3 instead of +2 or adding some other effect. INH5 fucked around with this message at 21:53 on Aug 7, 2013 |
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Aug 7, 2013 21:51
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Ferrinus posted:Stat swaps are really different from stat adds, and you already hit on why in your post. "Replace Str with ____" (I include the idea at the end of your post here) lets a Vigor-using vampire dump Strength, whereas "Add ___ to Str" doesn't. That established, I'm not sure what's supposed to be shocking about a power that uses other stats on your character sheet making buying those stats up attractive - all the Disciplines do that, it's why you tend to get high Int Ventrue. Vigor by default just gives you More of an extant thing, but getting more Vigor just gets you more of what Vigor does, it doesn't get you more of what another stat does. Celerity, same, plus the mostly-fiat-in-the-first-place Speed boost (but it's something). Resilience gives you downgrades and such. Adding statswap/adds into the mix makes them not be about the discipline, but about how well you gamed your other traits before getting to the point where you could unlock your full blond-hair-on-end potential. And this isn't even getting into Protean, baby's first coil.
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Aug 7, 2013 21:52
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Chernobyl Peace Prize posted:The difference is that you buy Disciplines up to get unique abilities, the effectiveness of which is determined by the stats that contribute to them (which includes the Discipline rank you bought in the first place, unless you're in lovely Changeling Power Town). I mean if you really did get rid of that (like you've mentioned before) with something like having your die pool for Disciplines with discrete powers gained per rank be Rating+BP or something, that would be one thing (which would make low-power play incredibly painful, mind, but it'd be something), that would be a seachange, for sure. But if Ventrue are the exert-mental-force-over-others-and-go-crazy-on-the-way guys, doesn't it make sense for them to have the highest Mental Power stat? Just like the Nosferatu being really good at only interacting with people in negative ways means they're deriving from Presence or Manipulation for force or finesse of personality, but only bringing the full force to bear in unpleasant fashions. It fits the clan themes. Right, and the point is to make the physical disciplines like the mental disciplines, in that each is an expression of its parent clan's nature and user's personality rather than an end unto itself totally disconnected from the rest of the game mechanics. Ventrue use their Intelligence to displace your will with their own... and they use their Resolve to refuse to fall even after suffering grievous harm! Daeva and Nosferatu literally hit you with the force of their overpowering personalities! (I particularly like using Composure to downgrade agg to lethal because it's like you're telling your beast to chill out and be cool instead of freaking out and evacuating your flesh at the first sign of trouble) Since the physical disciplines feed directly into the combat system, which happens to be the system with the most robust mechanical support and the most rigidly defined mechanical consequences, it's a particular bonus to end up with a situation where being a credible vampiric combatant means "having a dot or two of the physical disciplines" rather than "having as many dots of the physical disciplines as you can possibly muster because in any fight between two vampires you pretty much just compare the characters' ratings in each to determine the outcome". Having said that, it's clear to me that the highest dot of Resilience probably shouldn't be a "keep standing and fighting even when incapped" thing, because you don't want to hide combat competence in the very top end of a Discipline that isn't equally available to everyone.
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Aug 7, 2013 22:04
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Personally, I think that if you want to frontload the physical Disciplines, it would be better to have the first and second dots just give you a flat bonus (so, 1 dot of Vigor gives you +3 to Strength, 2 dots gives you +3 to whatever Intelligence was going to affect). If you add Attributes, it just goes from "have as many dots of the physical Disciplines as you possibly can" to "have as many dots of the associated Attributes as you possibly can."
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Aug 7, 2013 22:10
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INH5 posted:Personally, I think that if you want to frontload the physical Disciplines, it would be better to have the first and second dots just give you a flat bonus (so, 1 dot of Vigor gives you +3 to Strength, 2 dots gives you +3 to whatever Intelligence was going to affect). If you add Attributes, it just goes from "have as many dots of the physical Disciplines as you possibly can" to "have as many dots of the associated Attributes as you possibly can." You might be right. "+3" rather than "+Presence" feels a lot less flavorful, though. I think the first compromise I'd make would be something like "The highest of your Presence and your Vigor" rating, but even then I think I'd rather have a system in which combative vampires had reason to focus on their social stats rather than one in which truly combative vampires could feel free to dump their social stats because one day, one day... I think the problem with my first draft of Resilience was that it wasn't anime enough. So, with the more explicit aim of front-loading the actual combat-relevant parts of the discipline and making the higher levels more about stunts and lifestyle changes... 1. +Resolve to Stamina, 8-again when you Vitae-pump Stamina 2. Composure A reduced to L each scene, reflexive 1 WP to add Composure more to the stack 3. You can heal aggravated damage without a time delay. 4. Healing yourself of any damage at all cancels the material/game-mechanical effects of any mundane physical debilities you're suffering - you can walk on broken limbs, see through gouged-out eyes, etc. Healing yourself of (assailant's power stat) in suffered damage, or just spending that much Vitae as if to heal, lets you similarly ignore magical paralysis/enervation/transformation that works by sabotaging or disabling your body. (^^^^ I'm not sure about this power still) 5. You can spend 1 (2? 3?) Vitae the moment you take damage to enter a corpselike state in which damage is meaningless - thousand foot falls, steamrollers, and woodchippers can reduce you to a red paste, but no matter what all lethal damage (including formerly agg damage downgraded to lethal by level 2) you take is turned to bashing and at most one point of that bashing can wrap around to become lethal or aggravated per turn. It takes you an instant action to creepily pull yourself back together, though, and until you do that you can't heal yourself or take other actions more involved or strenuous than standing in place, talking or looking around. Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 22:51 on Aug 7, 2013 |
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Aug 7, 2013 22:42
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Ferrinus posted:5. You can spend 1 (2? 3?) Vitae the moment you take damage to enter a corpselike state in which damage is meaningless - thousand foot falls, steamrollers, and woodchippers can reduce you to a red paste, but no matter what all lethal damage (including formerly agg damage downgraded to lethal by level 2) you take is turned to bashing and at most one point of that bashing can wrap around to become lethal or aggravated per turn. It takes you an instant action to creepily pull yourself back together, though, and until you do that you can't heal yourself or take other actions more involved or strenuous than talking or looking around. Not what I generally associate with vampires, but I guess this could work. However, I have to ask just how far this could go? Could you theoretically use this to survive being a few feet away from an exploding nuclear bomb? Also, on the subject of nukes, I've long wondered whether the light from a thermonuclear (that is, fusion) bomb, or even just a regular atomic (fission) bomb would count as sunlight as far as vampires are concerned. Have any Vampire books, by any chance, addressed this? Ferrinus posted:4. Healing yourself of any damage at all cancels the material/game-mechanical effects of any mundane physical debilities you're suffering - you can walk on broken limbs, see through gouged-out eyes, etc. Healing yourself of (assailant's power stat) in suffered damage, or just spending that much Vitae as if to heal, lets you similarly ignore magical paralysis/enervation/transformation that works by sabotaging or disabling your body. Since I'd kind of like to use that power in my house-ruled version, I have to ask: what concerns do you have about it? Also, is there any particular reason you put that above healing agg damage without needing to sleep?
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Aug 7, 2013 22:54
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INH5 posted:Not what I generally associate with vampires, but I guess this could work. However, I have to ask just how far this could go? Could you theoretically use this to survive being a few feet away from an exploding nuclear bomb? I specified lethal damage, so it wouldn't save you from dragon breath (like, the literal kind) or being shot into the heart of the sun or something. I'm not sure as to the actual math, though - maybe it should just reduce damage to "5B" rather than "All B", for instance, to prevent timing issues that make you reluctant to heal yourself of too much damage or whatever. quote:Since I'd kind of like to use that power in my house-ruled version, I have to ask: what concerns do you have about it? Also, is there any particular reason you put that above healing agg damage without needing to sleep? Mostly that it's too niche and the supernatural shuck-off thing is an afterthought that's slightly redundant with the first dot of Resilience and doesn't take enough trouble to take the cost/power/rating/whatever of whatever magical effect it might be saving you from. I definitely want a "see through burned-out eye sockets" power in Resilience but I'm not sure that it can stand on its own and I'm still thinking about what exactly to pair it with. I put it after the agg healing thing since the agg healing thing is more materially statsuseful and so I was cagey about putting it out of the reach of most characters, but it's the kind of thing I could still easily change my mind about. Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 23:06 on Aug 7, 2013 |
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Aug 7, 2013 23:03
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Ferrinus posted:I put it after the agg healing thing since the agg healing thing is more materially statsuseful and so I was cagey about putting it out of the reach of most characters, but it's the kind of thing I could still easily change my mind about. The thing about the agg healing thing is that it generally isn't an in-combat power until you get a really high Blood Potency. Even using the B&S rules where your Vitae/turn = your Blood Potency, you wouldn't be able to heal 1 agg in a turn until you got to BP 5, and you'd still be using up a third of your maximum Vitae pool and all of your Vitae/turn on nothing else. You would nearly always be better off healing any lethal or bashing you have on top of your aggravated wounds. So what it would generally serve to make out-of-combat healing easier, not improve your ability to win a fight.
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Aug 7, 2013 23:19
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Oh, yeah, definitely. I was thinking that being full of agg and too scared to leave home was a more common vampire problem than not having an arm or something, so its antidote should be less obscure, but you could be right. Maybe: 1. as above 2. as above 3. Massive but non-supernatural trauma deals bashing to you rather than lethal, and healing a point of any kind of damage allows you to ignore physically crippling effects and wound penalties thereafter 4. Fast agg healing 5. You can reflexively enter a corpselike state (for free? for 1wp? for X vitae?) in which you can't take more than 1 point of non-aggravated damage in a round. It takes you an action to pull yourself back together, though, and until you do you can't heal or act (except to perceive things, talk, stand in place or lurch around slowly, etc). As written, the level 5 power still allows you to chump someone by going limp as soon as they've spend a bajillion Vitae and Willpower to hit you with an alpha strike, which I don't really want to be a thing. I'd like to find a way for it to cap your incoming damage in a way that neither trolls opponents nor gives you weird timing incentives w/r/t leaving your wounds unhealed.
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Aug 7, 2013 23:29
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Ferrinus posted:As written, the level 5 power still allows you to chump someone by going limp as soon as they've spend a bajillion Vitae and Willpower to hit you with an alpha strike, which I don't really want to be a thing. I'd like to find a way for it to cap your incoming damage in a way that neither trolls opponents nor gives you weird timing incentives w/r/t leaving your wounds unhealed. Maybe you could give it a minimum duration. You have to stay in that state for, say, 5 rounds before you can pop back up. So using in a fight would basically just be an attempt to play dead, not a combat maneuever. But it would still be useful for non-combat situations like jumping off of the roof of a skyscraper, surviving being run over by an approaching vehicle, and so on.
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Aug 7, 2013 23:53
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INH5 posted:Maybe you could give it a minimum duration. You have to stay in that state for, say, 5 rounds before you can pop back up. So using in a fight would basically just be an attempt to play dead, not a combat maneuever. But it would still be useful for non-combat situations like jumping off of the roof of a skyscraper, surviving being run over by an approaching vehicle, and so on. Oh, that's good. Say you can't start pulling yourself together until at least a turn has passed in which you haven't taken damage, and it becomes obvious to onlookers that you're reassembling yourself the turn before you actually resume full operation. Then again, that could leave it possible to surprise stunlock you in really cheesy ways, so you'd still probably want some kind of statute of limitations. I hate to go with "five" if it's possible to come up with something more trait-based, though. Maybe it costs 5 vitae to buy the ability to move/heal despite taking continuing abuse or similar.
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Aug 8, 2013 00:19
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I was thinking about my version of Resilience and I realized that 2 dots in Celerity will cancel out the Defense penalty of riot gear or plate armor, so I have to keep that in mind for balance purposes. I also kind of like this:Ferrinus posted:3. Massive but non-supernatural trauma deals bashing to you rather than lethal, and healing a point of any kind of damage allows you to ignore physically crippling effects and wound penalties thereafter So, perhaps: In addition to reducing weapon damage, each point of Res armor downgrades a point of fire damage to lethal. 1. 1 Res armor. 2. 1 Vitae for 3 Res Armor for a scene. 3. Massive but non-supernatural trauma deals bashing to you rather than lethal, you always ignore wound penalties, and healing even one point of the damage dealt to you by any attack or hazard is enough to allow you to ignore any of that attack/hazard's other debilitating effects.* 4. As before. 5. As before. * I separated wound penalties from healing because healing 2 points of bashing will almost always decrease your wound penalties by 2 anyway. INH5 fucked around with this message at 02:11 on Aug 8, 2013 |
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Aug 8, 2013 01:57
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Thinking about B&S's implementation of the physical Disciplines, it struck me that all those per-turn Vitae boost abilities could make round to round decision making quite a bit more complex. In 2004 Requiem, a BP 1 character with a dot in all three physical disciplines will activate Vigor and Resilience before the fight, and on each turn,* he'll be able to use a Vitae in one of three ways:
I can't see this being good for the pacing of combat. I can easily imagine this adding quite a bit more time to each turn as the players have to carefully consider which stat boost would be more optimal in this situation. Even as you go up in blood potency and you can do 2 or 3 of those things at once, there's still the issue of your total Vitae pool. Granted, the original system did have a bit of this problem with Celerity, where sometimes the damage prevented by boosting your Defense could be less than what you could have healed with that Vitae. But this is quite a bit worse. * This assumes a "normal" combat, where you're just fighting someone else and there aren't any special circumstances that might give you a reason to boost a skill check or resistance roll, or activate the blush of life, or whatever. INH5 fucked around with this message at 18:31 on Aug 8, 2013 |
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Aug 8, 2013 18:28
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I'm in the process of creating a vampire NPC for my Hunter game, and I figured that I could use this opportunity to test out a few of the rules from the B&S preview. But a few questions arose: 1. Does the Humanity penalty to "rolls to relate to humans" apply to the activation roll for Majesty 2 (Presence+Empathy+Majesty vs Resolve+BP) if it's used on a human? 2. More generally, if you don't have any dots in the skill required to activate a Discipline, do you take an untrained penalty on the activation roll?
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Aug 10, 2013 18:51
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Humanity-based penalties from to interact with humans don't apply to discipline powers (the clan-based penalties do, but I recommend that everyone pretend they don't). I'm pretty sure that untrained penalties do apply, though I'm pretty sure there isn't a piece of rules text which explicitly says so - it's just, like, if you're trying to use Dominate 2 you're making an Expression roll, right? And according to the rules, if you've got Expression 0... You're right about the immense option creep baked into the physical disciplines now. It was actually worse in the initial draft - you had to choose between adding your Vigor to your Strength or adding your Vigor to your weapon bonus - but I'm pretty disappointed that they didn't, for instance, condense all of Vigor's effects into a single activated power.
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Aug 10, 2013 21:46
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I've been thinking about my grappling rules, and while they do a decent job at providing a way to grab someone in order to prevent them from running away, it occurs to me that they don't provide a way to tackle someone to the ground and cuff them, or otherwise restrain a person without beating them into unconsciousness. But I obviously don't want to override the combat system with a separate grappling minigame like the actual rulebooks do. So, here's what I thought of: After you've grabbed someone, you can attempt to pin or restrain him by making a Brawl attack that, instead of dealing bashing damage, accumulates the successes as "grappling damage." If the target accumulates more "grappling damage" than they have empty Health boxes, then you have restrained him, and you can use an instant action to inflict the Immobilized Tilt on the target for a turn, which basically prevents him from doing anything except trying to escape the grapple (possibly with a penalty on the opposed roll, I'm not sure). If you have handcuffs or something, you can use them to restrain the Immobilized person by beating them at another opposed grapple roll. If a target escapes from a grab, all "grappling damage" is removed. Basically, it's like beating someone up except instead of getting knocked unconscious, they get put into a submission hold, or cuffed, or whatever. They're out of the fight either way, but this way they won't have any bashing or lethal marks in their health boxes after all is said and done. It's less reliable than actually inflicting damage, since if they break your hold, they get fully "healed," and they'll get multiple chances to escape even after they're restrained. Still, I'm wondering if I should do something like making the required "grappling damage" equal to their remaining Health + their Strength. Also, this relies on the assumption of unarmored mortal humans fighting each other. But there are other things in the World of Darkness, and they raise more questions. How should armor affect things? Should vampires use the same rules, at risk of providing an easy way to circumvent their lethal->bashing downgrade, immunity to bashing knockout, and Vitae healing? What about werewolf regeneration? I want this to be mainly a strategic/narrative decision that you make because you want to take someone down without harming them, not a tactical decision to make someone go down faster. But I'm not sure if there is an easy way to go about that. INH5 fucked around with this message at 06:54 on Aug 11, 2013 |
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Aug 11, 2013 06:51
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Are there any good articles that summarize Changeling? I want to give my players a decent idea of what the game is like and I’m sure someone out there has put together a nice, cohesive overview.
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Aug 12, 2013 06:40
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"You're an escaped kidnap victim constantly living in terror that your abductor will return and terrorize you. Everything you ever loved and knew is gone forever. Have fun!"
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Aug 12, 2013 06:57
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Elderbean posted:Are there any good articles that summarize Changeling? I want to give my players a decent idea of what the game is like and I’m sure someone out there has put together a nice, cohesive overview. Changeling is a game about being a trauma survivor.
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Aug 12, 2013 07:16
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Elderbean posted:Are there any good articles that summarize Changeling? I want to give my players a decent idea of what the game is like and I’m sure someone out there has put together a nice, cohesive overview.
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Aug 12, 2013 07:22
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The last couple of posts paint Changeling in some pretty dark terms, so I wanted to expand a bit. They aren't wrong. The basic premise is that your character gets kidnapped by rear end in a top hat Fairies at some point in their story, escapes Fairyland, only to discover they and the world they knew have changed drastically. The character has become strange from his time as a mythical servant. The world has moved on without them. All that being said there are a lot more stories in there. Does the character try to forge a new life, or does he reclaim the old? Does she delve deep into Changeling society or does she try to be as normal as she can? Changelings can be used to tell a whole variety of supernatural stories, from Fables to Grimm to Pan's Labyrinth and everything in between. Some Changelings are happy with their new existence, even celebrate it; some see themselves as aliens and monsters, and embrace that instead. I can't think of any super succinct reviews anywhere, and it would probably be easier to answer your questions than to keep trying to post 'sell me' information in the hopes of enticing you.
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Aug 12, 2013 14:58
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I know next to nothing about Changeling, but I'm curious: what's the 'humanity' stat for it, and what happens if it reaches zero?
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Aug 12, 2013 15:03
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Clarity. There are two possibilities for it reaching zero, depending on the power stat, Wyld. Hitting Clarity 0 results in a completely insane creature unable and unwilling to distinguish reality from fantasy. So usually it results in a broken Changeling.
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Aug 12, 2013 15:06
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It's "Clarity," and it essentially tracks how easily you can separate the real world from the world of the Hedge/Faerie. When you lose all of it, you pretty much can't tell what's what and have no hope of functioning sanely. IIRC, the book suggests that you pretty much just go catatonic.
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Aug 12, 2013 15:08
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DOCTOR ZIMBARDO posted:Clarity. There are two possibilities for it reaching zero, depending on the power stat, Wyld. Hitting Clarity 0 results in a completely insane creature unable and unwilling to distinguish reality from fantasy. So usually it results in a broken Changeling. Doesn't it also potentially turn you into a True Fae, if your Wyrd is high enough? ---- I've been working a bit more on my house-ruled physical Disciplines, and I realized I don't know much about how often aggravated damage actually comes up in Requiem play. I currently have Resilience giving you fire downgrades in the lower dots and improved agg healing in the higher dots, and I don't want the former to make the latter redundant. For reference, here's my current draft's progression of the fire/agg damage side of things: 1 dot-downgrade 1 point of fire damage from A->L per turn (not per attack), always 2 dots-spend a Vitae to get 2 points of fire downgrade/turn for a scene 3 dots-spend a Vitae to get 4 points of fire downgrade/turn for a turn 4 dots-spend 5 Vitae to heal a point of aggravated damage without waiting two days first The question is, how often would a vampire with the 2 and 3 dot powers actually take agg damage? And, as such, how useful would 4 actually be? Keep in mind that in B&S, Claws of the Wild no longer exists (the closest equivalent just does lethal to vampires). I don't have much experience with actual VtR play, so I don't have much to go on. This question is also relevant for B&S in general, as the RAW version of Resilience downgrades Resilience dots in fire damage each turn, for free, always. You have to wonder how that will affect things, even without considering the active fire damage reduction that also comes with B&S Resilience.
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Aug 12, 2013 18:31
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Elderbean posted:Are there any good articles that summarize Changeling? I want to give my players a decent idea of what the game is like and I’m sure someone out there has put together a nice, cohesive overview. Text of the statement from Michelle Knight, kidnapping victim, at the sentencing of her kidnapper. quote:"Good afternoon. My name is Michelle Knight. And I would like to tell you what this was like for me.
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Aug 12, 2013 19:00
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I initially read that as Micheal Knight, and thought I had missed a really weird episode of Knight Rider.
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Aug 12, 2013 19:12
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Cabbit posted:I initially read that as Micheal Knight, and thought I had missed a really weird episode of Knight Rider. KITT is actually a true fae.
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Aug 12, 2013 20:52
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I was thinking about starting our game of C:TL as a mortal game that gradually exposes them to the Fae and ends with their abduction. Would that work?
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Aug 14, 2013 02:27
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It would work just fine, though CtL itself suggests running that as a single session for a prelude. But yes, playing Mortals and then becoming Changelings is totally a cool and groovy thing.
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Aug 14, 2013 04:45
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Sounds like a good idea to me, though I did something for a vampire game once and it ended up taking a long time since each player had to be done individually.
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Aug 14, 2013 12:50
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Could always do it ah la final destination. Get them all snatched in the same instance caused by multiple fea going a snatching at the same time. It would certainly save you a bit of time.
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Aug 14, 2013 17:37
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Elderbean posted:I was thinking about starting our game of C:TL as a mortal game that gradually exposes them to the Fae and ends with their abduction. Would that work? I've run that scenario before, but like Baby Broomer I'd recommend slamming the True Fae harder and faster than, say, a Cthulu-esque mystery quest. C:tL's world is made of fantastic transitions and upsetting changes and doesn't stand up to slow plodding scrutiny as well: the game's entire metatiming system is built on having discrete scenes rather than an arbitrary clock, the world jumps via gates into dreams/hedge/arcadia/hollow/the real, the underlying emulation in the game is of recovering and finding meaning in life after the trauma rather than a slowly realizing you're going to experience trauma. For running it, I'd recommend doing something that I had fun with when it happened to me: have every player be the 'Keeper' of the player to the right that alters the mortal into a changeling. Give them permission to be funny/tragic/evocative, they'll get the game a little more when they do it. Further, you'll speed up the second-stage character creation time because people won't be as likely to sperg over every ounce of viability.
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Aug 14, 2013 18:04
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It's interesting that a coterie of gentry would snatch a troupe of changelings like that. That has implications.
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Aug 14, 2013 19:07
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So I'm doing a Vampire mini-game to test out some of the God-Machine and Reap The Whirlwind mechanics, thought you might like to see the character creation method I wrote up. The game is set in 1921 - the characters are the last Invictus coterie in a town that's increasingly been taken over by a charismatic Lancea Sanctum Prince on a tear due to prophetic visions (she really has them) and kindness to certain vulnerable Kindred (she really has it). For the last fifty odd years she's wiped the Invictus off the map one by one, Kindred by Kindred, coterie by coterie, until there's just one left, the player characters. Hell, even the Carthians are doing good in this city, and everyone knows they're just horrible pieces of garbage. However, their territory contains the nightclub which became the hottest speakeasy in town and as soon as Prohibition came to pass essentially every mortal in town ran up to them and shoved huge wads of money into their pockets and promised to do whatever they wanted. Of course the Invictus fully expect the PCs not just to survive but to prosper and prevail, starting with this small beginning and moving on to bigger things. I had them pick from a list of characters in the coterie as described to a slightly distant Invictus Prince by a Herald who had traveled to the city to check the lay of the land:
This is also the way for the players to pick what the game is going to be about. If they pick "rackets, police, violence, gangs", that's a crime syndicate they're forming. If they pick "What the hell, politics, servants, violence", that's a very Kindred-focused game. Anyway, they picked Customers, Politics, Servants and Swells. So we're looking at a game that's balanced between mortal and Kindred matters, and balanced between upper and lower class. (Boardwalk Empire seems a good model here, especially in the "legitimate" political aspect of the characters.) Next, I decided to do a somewhat more detailed set of Masquerade options, in order to help them channel a character concept out of those basic "functions". Remember, no one has really written a background or even a full concept at this point. Next post will have my Masquerade options for the four that the characters picked.
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Aug 15, 2013 06:20
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Here were my options: The One That Handles The Swells
The One That Handles The Servants
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Aug 15, 2013 06:24
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| # ? Jun 9, 2024 20:30 |
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The One That Handles The Politics
The One That Handles The Customers
So each of them picked a Masquerade: the Socialite, the Organizer, the Eraser, the Aristocrat. Now I'm in the process of doing the same for the Requiem - essentially to give them a choice of 3 Requiems for each, I'm taking the core concept and adding either fear, anger or hunger (the three aspects of the Beast) to the Masquerade. I can post those too if people are interested...thanks for reading the tl;dr. Hope it helps show an alternate way to really focus down character concepts to a campaign concept.
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Aug 15, 2013 06:28
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